Full Fathom Five
by Tilts At Windmills
Summary: AU. What would have happened if Thomas Cromwell had not chosen to move against Queen Anne? Currently on hiatus.
1. Intervention

**A/N:** Spoilers for Season 2, and a good working knowledge of the show would probably benefit a reading of this story. This fic is very much a speculative 'what if', considering how one decision could change the events of Anne Boleyn's fall, so for now will retread the familiar ground of Season 2's final episodes, but from a slightly different angle. It takes place entirely in the Showtime Tudors universe, and makes no claim on history.

All the dialogue is taken directly from episodes 2.07 and 2.08.

_**Full Fathom Five**_

_Full fathom five thy father lies; _

_Of his bones are coral made; _

_Those are pearls that were his eyes; _

_Nothing of him that does fade, _

_But doth suffer a sea-change _

_Into something rich and strange. _

_Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell: _

_Ding-dong, _

_Hark! Now I hear them – Ding-dong, bell. _

'_The Tempest' _

_William Shakespeare_

_1. Intervention_

She could trace its origins back to a moment of frantic bargaining played out against the nimbus of a bank of candlelight. It was there, palms flat against the marble, prostrate as a bird downed by archers, that she bartered herself for the sake of him…herself, and the child that dwelt finitely in her womb.

_Anything…oh God, it would be better than this…_

Could it be God's Will that broke this wave across her, when it had seemed that all the tumult of the past weeks had been overlaid and muted by her newfound, unquiet peace? Katherine gone, and fragile life promising so much within her, and the way ahead - light-lined, and glorious, and redolent of possibility. There was no room for death in all of that, surely?

She only vaguely formulated the rhythms of abstract prayers in her mind, her lips still, her clasped hands merely a dutiful obeisance to the deeper ritual of her plea. She was aware of the remote movements of the chapel's blithely continuing life beyond the arch behind her, as though a tricksy and industrious echo darted fairylike among the shadows, but Anne kept her watch in solitude, her veiled head inclined beneath the vigilant eye of the Cross.

_Please_…_please_… Against the candle burn, she had plighted herself once before. Now she sought the same vow's reaffirmation, its constancy in keeping the pact: his life, her life, unto death. Nothing else. _If it please you, oh Lord…to spare him… _The pain of his eyes turning beyond her to another's bed mattered not, now, not when everything tilted on its precipice and Anne could look with equal clarity from joy to ruin.

When she heard the brisk footfall behind her, it took every fibre of her ringing nerves to turn around, certain as she was of what news had been brought to her...

But instead, it was Thomas Cromwell whom she saw melting into stillness from the haste of his step, her gaze staying him as though he were a cat whose prey had scented the changing wind.

Here! She almost reeled with the outrage. What homage could he possibly wish to pay, what miracles did cheats ever beg for? The preservation of his own neck, perhaps, for did he foresee the terrible potential of her Regency, and what justice she could bring to bear on the vulpine knaves who had moved against her? Here, defiling her wretched peace with his very presence, breaking the terms of her covenant with his slow, halting bow to her, his fear-sick eyes. She felt the urge to scream at him to leave her be rising inside her; the paradox of him kneeling there in a sulphurous double of her was enough to bring the bile to her throat, and she turned back to the Cross deliberately, willing herself into clarity. She could not afford to lose sight of her wits now, even while the knowledge of his presence bore down on her such that he fissured across her every determined appeal for intervention, mocking her grief with his lawyer's case to the Almighty. No doubt he argued a most beguiling justification for his own flourishing from the ashes of this calamity.

And yet…yet this was a place that forced equanimity, that humbled utterly. Try as she might to search for it, there had been no disrespect in his manner, only an answering doubt that met her own enquiring gaze. He had come with the same purpose as she, to attempt to reason with the unfathomable logic of circumstance and, perhaps, to seek some solace in the infinitude of the wisdom that she too petitioned, without success. Maybe he, with his renowned intellect, this artful raven of the court, would pluck from the silence better answers than she? Maybe a bargain _could _be struck here today, won on her behalf.

_Go_, she thought, still fierce. But no. _Stay. Stay and answer for me._

When she turned again (it seemed to be only moments, but it was impossible to tell as one half-prayer breathed into another), he had already gone, her silent request left hanging unanswered in his wake.

* * *

Not without a sting of resentment, she thought back to the time of their last meeting. He had resisted her inquisition then, as now. Always, always she must stand apart from the contrivances of these men, only guessing at this shadow's, this Cromwell's intentions.

_Your Majesty? Mr Secretary Cromwell is here._

She bided the time patiently before she dealt her hand, but when she did, the obsequious formality of his smile melted at the crisply pointed allusion in her tone. "Better uses…madam?" There. That small hesitation that seemed a wilful beat of disregard, gentling his contempt of her with silence.

"Yes," she said sharply. "For endowments to charitable and educational causes. Which even Wolsey did." She dropped the name of his ill-famed predecessor casually, but to deliberate effect, and she felt a murmur of satisfaction when she saw that her aim had been true. She ventured out on another prowled circuit of him, pleasuring coolly in the man's brief fumble for a response. After several seconds, he deflected with nervous delicacy.

"Madam, I am surprised to hear you question the King's policy, which your father and brother wholeheartedly support -- "

She rounded on him again, purposefully invading his personal space, and she saw the momentary tremor of his lips as he licked them, steeling himself for the next parry. "I question the policy, _Mr Secretary_, because I am not convinced that it _is _the King's."

"Madam, I -- "

"You are far too high-handed, Mr Cromwell." Her voice lashed across his, and he broke off, helpless to intercept. A pause, and then her tone softened, almost tenderly, the intimate assurance of a lover: "You ought to be careful, or I'll have you cropped at the neck." Such power to wield, the knife-point hers to turn.

He blinked at the eccentric lightness of the threat, not quite a flinch, but she caught the expression of staunched surprise in his face, a parting of his lips as he visibly tried to decipher whether or not she meant this positing of his death as a jest. It was a little triumph to butt her head against the Chancellor's obdurate defences and see him stumble, however slightly. He was layered like an artichoke, and there were times when, through spite and irritation as much as anything else, she longed to prise a fingernail beneath his surface, flay back the adamantine and reveal the vulnerable exposure of palpitating flesh underneath, the dark treasures of his heart laid bare for her perusal. After all, did she not have a claim on him, as others? The man's veins flowed with pure ice water, it was true, but it had become habit with her of late to tease out the possibility of finding the chink through which red, red rose might dye the stream.

She jerked her head in curt dismissal of him, feeling her own mouth crimping proudly with the performance of hauteur. There was still that flicker of mystification behind his eyes, as though he had laid too many snares himself not to suspect others of chicanery. Her statement had been too boldly unequivocal to trust.

Anne schooled herself to not follow his path to the door, but she was aware of him half-turning before he left, his lingering gaze on her, a question almost asked, still guessing at their fortunes that ran aligned in mutual uncertainty.

* * *

Out of the engulfing sorrow came reprieve , for the King at least. For a time, at least.

_Oh my God…oh my God…oh my God, what is this? What is this? Just when my belly is doing its business I find you wenching with Mistress Seymour!_

_Hush…sweetheart…_

_Why are you doing this? Why did you have to do this?_

_

* * *

_

Animal-prone, cornered by her grief, she half-knelt like a cat at bay in the tangle of the bed sheets, her fingernails still caked underneath and stained around the quick with dried blood, eyes raw with the horror that trammelled her, and it was like that, quiet in his coldness, that he came to her. His hard blue gaze was turned inward with shock, seeing nothing but his own pain.

What he came to tell her was very simple. She would have been able to tell him it herself.

"You have lost my boy." _My boy. MY BOY. _Clutching the pulpy mess that rushed unstoppable from between her legs…if she held the bleeding in, it would not be true… She thought that she could still feel the tiny heart beating like it was made from clockwork…

Two unspeakable graves, one for each of them, both weighing in their excruciating relentlessness on her own shoulders, strangled love and dead babies.

"I'll not speak of it. The loss is too great. But I see now that God will not grant me _any _male children." He seemed to find an anchorage in his anger, mastering himself against her. He was turning away, his absenting gaze vigilant, those eyes that had drank her like slaking water… "When you are up, I will speak with you."

She felt the certainty of his conviction of her like a gallows-drop. He had come not to comfort her, nor to assure himself of her health, but to condemn her from a closed book, in the blood-rank airlessness of this death chamber. And through the stark simplicity of this denunciation, he had not moved, but had stood there, looking at her, as though he saw right through her to the empty, mortified flesh of her core, the barrenness and devastation of loss that rendered her utterly without meaning or importance to him.

"It is not all my fault." Anne's voice rasped from her, distorted with the white heat of her misery. She was taken by a wild and elated conviction that she could goad him into retaliation, that _this _was the way to shatter that wall of ice that had formed behind his eyes and make him _see _her again, and she flung out her accusation like a slap, her fingers clawing instinctively in the thin cotton of her nightdress as she cried the words at his implacably turned back like the hammering fists of a petulant child. "You have no one to blame but _yourself_ for this." She gulped air, too furious to sob. "I was distressed to see you with that _wench _Jane Seymour because the love I bear you is so great..." For a moment, the absoluteness of this nightmare consumed her and her voice broke, silencing her with its pain. She felt desperation contorting her mouth, the urge to weep so strong that it almost buckled her, the muscles in her stomach reflexively pinching and contracting with sobs that she could not allow to fly free. "It broke my heart to see you loved others," she whispered, and she was pleading now, in all the agony of her defiance, striking out blindly for she saw not the path ahead of her, nor how emptily her hands clutched at salvation.

He had slowed, half to the door, and she could see the taut lines of his back working as he fought to contain the weight of his own sorrow, and in that moment, in a flash, she felt and understood all the implications of him leaving her in this room, the perfect clarity of her future tottering in the balance of its fortunes like a child's top spun with a careless hand. Her choice, slain across her path.

He cut her down, across the room, his averted head turning dismissively, all the more crushing for the angle of his face she was just allowed to glimpse.

"_I said, I will speak with you - when you are well_."

She felt the rising cry, building in voluptuous agony, but she was falling, only falling.

* * *

_tbc..._


	2. Fata Morgana

First off, huge thanks to everyone who has reviewed, favourited and story-alerted so far. It makes me happy! *tacklehugs* And makes me want to post more, too. Joy.

Secondly, I hope everyone bears with the change in tone in this chapter. I have an outline in my head of where I want this story to go, and it involves a little ground-work first. You'll have to trust me when I say that everything connects…somehow =D

More comprehensive author's notes at the end of the chapter.

_2. Fata Morgana_

_February 1536_

It had occurred to Thomas Cromwell, through a not entirely painless process of trial and error, that the numerous and varying causes of disquiet in the world could very rarely be realistically countered through the small virtues of a set of scales and an abacus. Yet it was with precisely these humble tools that he had been equipped to repel the combined forces of corruption and iniquity, the collective crises of superstition arising from portentous alignments of celestial bodies (the recent sighting of a comet over the Kentish marshes had provoked a veritable storm of doom-mongering), and, less expected but entirely more problematic, the meddlesome infractions created by one Ferdinand Cawley, latterly usurped dean of Rochester.

Cawley's history had been a colourful one, to say the least. Removed from his position at Rochester after his unfortunate taste for nature's more bacchanalian properties had led to a suspicious increase in the growth in poppies outside his study window, he had enjoyed a brief flourishing in the aftermath of the dissolution of the local abbey when his vociferous stance against the building's demolition had elevated his previously insignificant reputation to the level of minor notoriety. Cawley had campaigned tirelessly for approximately one day, before his arrest by a muster of local noblemen and his own premature boredom with his briefly burning activist spirit conspired against him, and he retired deeper into Kent in a state of disappointingly non-existent infamy.

But the crusading heart chafes at dormancy…or at least, the inspirational effects of good ale can result in surprising resourcefulness. By the September of 1534, Cawley had been living in modest obscurity in Meopham where he had opened his house to the local poor, offering provisions and sustenance of a tactfully non-religious ilk. Meanwhile, it appeared that he had acquired a fervent but otherwise largely harmless taste for carpentry; throughout the year of 1535, his spacious, previously dilapidated house flourished piecemeal, sprouting adjacent lean-tos, precarious extensions to the attic that drooped over the road, teetering curlicues of façade that overlapped the original building in an irregular quadrangle so that the mingled rich and erratic grandeur of the building seemed to straggle past and present, and it was possible to stand between the two opposing walls, neither within the house nor without it, but stranded somewhere in-between like the incongruent patchwork tending an elderly blanket. At any time of the day, it was possible to detect Cawley himself, scrambling like an industrious termite over the varyingly decrepit and burgeoning parts of the building. In time, it became something of a spectator sport for the townsfolk to gather and observe the vertiginous feats of their local eccentric, and occasionally exchanging wagers as to whether today he might lose his tentative balance and plunge to his death from the highest tower of his wonderful but mystifying creation.

Thus it was perhaps not unsurprising that it was a disgruntled neighbour who first raised a suspicious eyebrow as to just what precisely was dwelling within the confines of this architectural prodigy. Within days of the first murmurings of possible transgression in their midst, the sergeant-at-arms and his men paid Cawley a visit, and panel by panel, board by board, splinter by splinter, the house was taken apart.

But instead of exiled dissidents from the Continent plotting the overthrow of the monarchy from the crow's-nest of Cawley's house, or gold and jewels beaten into the floorboards, what they found there were priests, holed up like skeletons of the murdered in the hollow walls of the building. About him, Cawley had built the most splendid, tattered palace of recusancy in the kingdom.

* * *

It could have been argued that Cawley had been misled by sentiment. He was an elderly man, impressionable to the tender wiles of the heart, and these recalcitrant dogs of the old faith had surely preyed upon that and exploited him most heinously. Yet the artfulness of Cawley's deception was undeniable, as was its sheer scale, and even if it could be proposed that he had been taken advantage of and duped into providing shelter for traitors to the realm, the evidence provided in the shape of his tottering castle of fallacy told otherwise. Along with those he had sought to protect, Cawley was clapped in irons and removed forthwith to the gaol.

And that should have been the end of the matter. Indeed, it would have been, had Thomas Starkey not chosen that moment to return home to England from Venice.

* * *

Cromwell's suspicions should have been aroused by the irritatingly tactful reprimand woven into the impeccable rhetoric of Starkey's letter:

_On matters regarding policy and governance, we may not have always agreed, but my dear friend, I have firmly held the belief that in you I trust to ever speak the truth on all issues, and that it has never been the case that, as wiser men have stated, probitas laudatur er alget._

Well, _touché_. He was playing back before the die had even been cast. Cromwell was well-acquainted with the idiosyncrasies of his own conscience, but the walls around him were sprung with an acrostic of trick-locks through which he pleased to task no one to find their way. If it had been anyone but Starkey, he would have dismissed the matter out of hand and applied his entreating letter to the flame, but Cromwell owed the man several more favours than he cared to list, and…well, it was possible that Starkey held his own shining key. Perhaps they had been friends too long for him not to.

So grimly, expecting the worst, he read on. As Starkey posited it, this man Cawley was an embodiment of the culture of intolerance that was now prospering out of the ruins of torn-down corruption, a martyr to the enlightened era that was as emblematic of the commendable generosity of the human spirit as it was the of Reformation's own flaws, flaws that could have potentially far-reaching consequences should they not be checked in time and brought to a unifying conclusion. If, Starkey argued, Cawley was released and afforded the freedom to present his case to an assembly (perhaps even to Cromwell himself, the letter wheedled implicitly), then surely a resolution that benefited all concerned might be reached. After all, could charity, even when wrong-headed, ever be considered truly a crime?

It was an absurd notion.

And utterly impracticable given the circumstances. To set one precedent for listening to the demands of traitors would open the sluice to every other plaintive in the land to come knocking at the gates of London with their grievances like so many pilgrims seeking the alms of a miracle-worker. Clearly Starkey had spent far too long troubling the libraries of Italy to have developed any form of understanding of the complexities of the new world order. One could not simply acquiesce to these people; it was only through a process of the systematic enforcement of the reformed faith that the deeply embedded habits of exploitation and immorality could be driven out for good. And here was this lawyer with the Venetian sun in his eyes, shambling back into the country with ideas about _conversation_.

_I flatter myself not; hearing of your recent successes leads me to presume that you have been able to subsist most admirably without my guidance, and yet I nonetheless have a fancy to look in on you whilst in London. Should it please you to be available for me to look at, I will attend on you at the earliest convenience._

Starkey could couch his visit in whatever cosily familiar terms he liked; quite baldly, it was a petition, and a most inconvenient one at that.

And yet…. Yet something in the letter had sparked off a fire-line in Cromwell's mind that proved impossible to ignore. He was guilty of his own share of legal wrangling in the past, after all. He found himself getting the chancellery records from last year down off the shelf and flicking through to the report on Ferdinand Cawley's arrest. The man had been interviewed extensively throughout the month of November, but had never been brought to trial. There were addenda cluttering the margins of the report, scribbled in a brisk, unfamiliar hand, and with a reluctant curiosity Cromwell inspected each and every one of them, slipping with unconscious ease into habitual fervency as his shoulders hunched in concentration. It didn't take long to refresh his memory on the particulars of the case; he remembered feeling a small glimmer of amused admiration for the man's audacity. Treason it might well have been, but there was something almost charmingly imprudent in the sheer imagination of Cawley's dissemblance. Still, he seriously compromised himself by robustly refusing to confess to any wrong-doing. At the time, Rich had implied the possible effectualness of strong-arm tactics, but that solution had seemed…inelegant at best, monstrous at worst. It would have been a dark day at court when the men of the chancellery resorted to roughing up elderly prisoners. A younger man would have borne it better. No, there had to be a way of reasoning with the fellow. Everyone, it usually emerged, could be found to be persuadable, given the right incentives.

Although, as the report now told Cromwell, evidently not.

He had pulled his chair up at a careless angle to his desk, and he now sat with his legs crossed and twisted to the side, one tense hand supporting the engrossed tilt of his head as he bent forward over the papers. The transcriptions of Cawley's interrogation were frustratingly disjointed; whoever had compiled them clearly had no idea about how to succinctly collate material. Here, something from the twenty-fifth of November last year, six days after Cawley's arrest: the prisoner was asked about his involvement with the Suffolk insurgents, a rising of very little significance that had taken place towards the end of 1533 that had been easily put down by the Duke's own retainers. Cawley denied the accusation emphatically, and with some justification. He had still been attached at Rochester at that time, and for him to have taken part in a rebellion some hundred and twenty miles away would have been nigh on impossible. However, the next part of the transcription seemed to argue otherwise; here Cawley claimed to have been in contact with several of the uprising's leaders, one of whom was later to be discovered secreted behind a false panel in Cawley's own pantry, and that indeed he had liaised with a number of them as recently as the June of that year. Which would have been entirely feasible as evidence for Cawley's faltering alibi, had this confession not come two days _before _Cawley's strident denial of having any knowledge of the uprising whatsoever.

And here -- Cromwell flicked the edge of the paper in disgust, as though he could somehow prompt its writer into being less wilfully obtuse. The twenty-eighth of November: Cawley was interviewed by Sir Henry Rotham, a reliable enough source. But in this transcription, one of the very men Cawley had been convicted of sheltering, and who he himself had identified and named six days earlier, was now the same man Cawley claimed to know not a thing about.

_Upon my soul, he is a stranger to me, sir._

Either the man was mad, or Cromwell was employing the services of incompetent knaves.

In brief submission to his fraying temper, he flung the report back down on his desk before his patience finally extinguished itself in a long sigh and he sat back in his chair, grinding the heels of his hands into his eyes. A headache had been growing behind his temples all morning, and this irritation was doing nothing to relieve it. He rested his head against the back of the chair, his eyes absently pursuing the spidery fissure of a long crack in the ceiling as his thoughts expanded outward. So it was the desire of Starkey's conscience that they pay court to the whims of a lunatic who couldn't keep his story straight from one day to the next? Of course, the frustration was that it would be impossible to discern whether the fault indeed lay with the clerk who had originally set the report down, and therein lay the very real danger of the matter; if the dates of Cawley's interviews had simply been transposed, then human error could be responsible for the dismissal of a case against a traitor to the realm. As it stood, Cawley's conviction, should Starkey indeed choose to pursue it, was potentially unsafe. Cromwell's headache made its own feelings about that idea clear with a sharp twinge of discomfort, and he grimaced as he pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to both stave off the pain and crystallize the possible avenues of mistake. How could he _himself _have missed this when the report was first issued? So many hundreds of different writs passed through his hands from day to day that it was all but impossible to distinguish one from the other in his memory, but that was no real excuse. Was it possible that Starkey had somehow obtained copies of the transcription, and that was why he seemed so confident of the old man's acquittal? Surely not…surely not even if…

"Mr Secretary?"

He had retreated so far into the cloudy depths of his memory that the cautious entreat seemed as intrusive a disturbance as a pair of hands grasping at his shoulders, and he started so violently that his arm slipped off the armrest of the chair, jolting a nerve in the groove of his elbow. His hand automatically moving to grasp at the tremoring pain, he looked up to meet the eyes of the clerk.

"Yes?" A little more sharply than he had intended.

The boy, perhaps understandably, made a small, anxious moue. "Mr Secretary, the King commands that you attend on him at once."

Cromwell slowly pushed his chair away from his desk, rubbing his still-tingling elbow. He was struggling to pull himself back into the present, and in a foggy attempt at re-aligning his wits he frowned speculatively at the window. A watery noon sun was stealthing through the leaves of the silver birch outside.

"Did His Majesty say what it was that he requested?" As he spoke, his hand moved to smooth down across his Chain of Office, an unconscious act that was becoming almost habitual, like a talisman of reassurance. Now though, his hand lingered a moment over the cold links of metal where he felt his heart beating beneath.

The boy's head shook in an apologetic negative. "No, sir." Which was all one came to expect. Perhaps it was wise to beware the portent of comets after all.

With a swift, irritable gesture, Cromwell flipped the chancellery records shut. _Honesty be praised, indeed_, he thought darkly.

_tbc..._

* * *

**A/N:**

_'Probitas laudatur er alget _-- Honesty is praised and left to starve.'

The Satires of Juvenal.

**Thomas Starkey** (c. 1495 – 1538) was an English political theorist and humanist. He came to Cromwell's attention soon after returning to England in 1534 from Padua, where he had been studying for his law degree. An abiding friendship quickly developed. Cromwell and Starkey were known to have disagreed over the suppression of the smaller monasteries, with Starkey believing that monastic revenues should be used for the common good and 'of the benefits of prayers and alms'. However, the two men remained close friends until Starkey's death just two years before Cromwell's own. Starkey was an admirer of the government of Venice, hence my placing him in Venice around the time of this story.

Apologies for the slight pre-empting of history in this chapter. As far as I know, the sheltering of 'recusants', a term used to describe those who committed the statutory offence of not complying with and conforming to the Established church or the State religion, the Church of England, was only first practised and thus deemed an offence during the reign of Elizabeth I. But I decided to massage the facts a little in order to accommodate a fictional subplot of mine that will grow in significance as the story progresses. Also, to my knowledge, there has never been an abbey in Rochester. Ferdinand Cawley, and all events concerning him, are my own invention and have no basis in history.


End file.
